Over the Rainbow

In spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature—including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace—while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.Over the Rainbow collects essays by Jes Battis, Robin Bernstein, Thomas Crisp, June Cummins, Elizabeth A. Ford, Sherrie A. Inness, Christine A. Jenkins, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Biddy Martin, Robert McRuer, Claudia Nelson, Jody Norton, Tison Pugh, Catherine Tosenberger, Eric L. Tribunella, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Andrea Wood. These pieces will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's literature, American Studies, LGBTQ and queer studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

For each group of essays, Abate and Kidd raise questions ... about 'the canon' and the relationship between queerness and canonicity; identity politics and the transformative power of children's literature; and how queerness moves among nonnormative readers, reading practices, and genres. Taken together, these tensions highlight the fundamental questions underpinning queer approaches to children's and young adult literature, which scholars will inevitably face as we navigate the flexible and shifting meanings of queerness." —Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Kenneth Kidd is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida.Michelle Abate is Associate Professor of English at Hollins University.